Avaya Unveils Roadmap for Future of Business Communications

Published on 20/01/2010

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Avaya has unveiled its vision for the future of communications and a roadmap that integrates products and services from the recently acquired Nortel Enterprise Solutions to create a new standard for business communications.

Avaya’s vision is based on open standards, communication-enabled business systems and effective, contextual, real-time communications. Using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) organisations, large to small, can make smooth transitions to new capabilities at their own pace while protecting existing communications investments. Avaya’s communications-enabled business systems streamline business processes by injecting real-time communications where they can provide value. Users are able to be more effective by having access to information based on the context of the task at hand.

“The integrated roadmap we’re outlining today supports Avaya’s commitment to providing customers with the advanced communications capabilities they need to manage and grow their organisations,” said Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president, Global Communications Solutions, Avaya. “In developing the portfolio, our guiding principle was to deliver the most compelling and cost-effective systems and services to customers and partners.”

Roadmap Highlights

The new roadmap builds on the existing Avaya portfolio with capabilities integrated from Nortel Enterprise Solutions. The roadmap highlights include:

Unified Communications

The centrepiece of the unified communications (UC) portfolio is Avaya Aura, a SIP-based communication platform that unifies complex communications networks. With proven abilities to reduce infrastructure costs and easily deploy centralised collaboration and customer service applications, Avaya Aura provides an upgrade path for all existing Nortel voice and UC customers. The roadmap expands the value of Avaya Aura with the addition of Avaya (formerly Nortel) Agile Communications Environment (ACE). ACE uses Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services to facilitate the rapid development of communications enabled applications.

Contact Centre

Avaya Aura will also be at the centre of Avaya’s contact centre portfolio. With this foundation, contact centres will move to a SIP-based, service-oriented architecture, simultaneously supporting multiple modes of communication. The new contact centre solution will be based on a new and collaborative work assignment model that will connect customers, agents, and information. The new capabilities will enable businesses and organisations to stay ahead of growing customer care demands for tighter integration and lower costs. The company says this integrated roadmap will seamlessly extend Avaya and Nortel Enterprise Solutions market leading portfolio with capabilities for agent desktop, work assignment, experience management, analytics that will scale from mid-range to large contact centres.

Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Communications

Avaya IP Office, BCM, Norstar, PARTNER and Integral 5 all remain for sale with a plan to converge the platforms to the company’s flagship hybrid IP offering, IP Office. Avaya will blend Nortel features, interfaces and phones with IP Office to create a richer solution with strong investment protection benefits. This approach follows the model Avaya has successfully implemented with other systems into IP Office.

The company also now offers the Avaya Software Communication System, a SIP-based offer from NES for small and medium enterprise customers who want to manage unified communications from their data centre.

Data Products

As Avaya previously announced, it will adopt the current roadmap of NES data products in its entirety. Avaya believes that the technology, customer base and innovative product roadmap represent a compelling value proposition for global customers. A key component of plug and play communications is the underlying, enabling network and the new Avaya data portfolio brings significant advantages of “Always-On” reliability, network efficiency and scalability to grow with customer’s business needs. Included in the Avaya data portfolio are solutions for Ethernet Switching, Routers, Wireless Networking, Access Control and Unified Management.